Tag Archives: RazorEngine console app

In the last post I left off describing how I implemented the parsing of the XUnit console runner xml in the XUnit.Reporter console app. In this post I want to talk through how you can take advantage of the excellent RazorEngine to render the model to html.

I am going to talk through the console app line by line. The first line of the app:

var reporterArgs = Args.Parse<ReporterArgs>(args);

Here we are using the excellent PowerArgs library to parse the command line arguments out into a model. I love how the API for PowerArgs has been designed. It has a slew of features which I won’t go into here for example it supports prompting for missing arguments all out of the box.

This line uses the RazorEngine to compile the view containing my html, it gives the view the key name “testTemplate” in the RazorEngine’s internal cache. What is neat about this is that we can deploy the TestView.cshtml as an embedded resource so it becomes part of our assembly. We can then use the AssemblyResource class to grab the text from the embedded resource to pass to the razor engine.

We then create the TestPageModel using the TestPageModelBuilder. Using a builder here gives you very readable code. Inside the builder we are using the XmlParser from earlier to parse the xml and generate the List of TestAssemblyModels. We also take the optional PageTitle argument here to place in the page title in our view template.

The last 3 lines simply create a StringWriter which is used by the engine to write the compiled template to. Calling Engine.Razor.Run runs the template we compiled earlier using the key we set “testTemplate”. After this line fires our html will have been written to the StringWriter so all we have to do is extract it and then write it out to the html file path that was parsed in.

That’s all there is to it. We now have a neat way to extract the Given, When, Then gherkin syntax from our XBehave texts and export it to html in whatever shape we chose. From there you could post to an internal wiki or email the file to someone, that could all be done automatically as part of a CI build.

If anyone has any feedback on any of the code then that is always welcomed. Please check out the XUnit.Reporter repository for all of the source code.